AR.OUND CITY HALL P OPULAR predictions last year that hIstory would remember the nineteen-eighties as a Republican decade, in which the Democrats could only hunker down and repent their sins, have now been stashed away by many Americans, along with such dated items as WIN buttons and alleg- edly authentic splinters from Amy Carter's tree house. However, in the face of a faltering economy and other developments that many believe have ominous implications for the Grand Old Party, Washington continues, for the short run at least, to be a Republi- can show. Or, at any rate, that is the word from local politicians who regu- larly travel back and forth between N ew York and the capital. This inter- city traffic is naturally nowhere near as heavy as it was in the era when Presi- dent Carter was eager to reward New York political leaders for having pro- vided the decisive bloc of electoral votes that put him over in 1976. Four years later, he was even more eager to have the favor repeated, and during some weeks in the summer and early fall of 1980 it would have been a chal- lenge to try to locate aNew York poli- tician of any importance-a Demo- crat, that is-who had not recently had a meal of some kind at the White House. Nowadays, the people invited to break bread at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are likely to be Republicans from the Sun Belt, leaving most Democrats feeling out of things, even as they scheme to improve their party's position in this fall's congres- sional and gubernato- rial elections. Last month, when Connect- icut Senator Christo- pher Dodd was seen serving as a gofer, fetching a drink for New York producer Joseph Papp at the Washington opening of Papp's "Pirates of Penzance," Dodd ex- plained, "There's not much of anything bet- ter or more important for me to do these days. I'm a Democrat" If he had been urged to had been "puffing" -as he described it-some of his credentials; specifical- ly, he had told reporters that during the Vietnam W ar he had been drafted and had ultimately served as a second lieutenant, whereas Pentagon records revealed that he had never been in the Army. Caputo eventually said that he was sorry "if I misspoke," resorting to a term that has been put to frequent use lately by White House aides trying to account for the President's occa- sionally imaginative use of figures Caputo's misspeaking was deemed to be beyond political indulgence, but it took so long for him to realize this that one local political pollster com- mented, "He's actually dead, but he's like a soldier shot in the middle of a charge who takes a few steps before he falls on his face," indicating the de- gree to which some people in the poli- ticians' world come to think of their trade in life-and-death terms-but failing to acknowledge the irony of knocking off the unfortunate Caputo metaphorically in a military setting. On March 12th, four days after Caputo finally withdrew, State Comp- troller Edward Regan, who had had the strong backing of State Chairman Clark in seeking the Republican nomi- nation for Governor, took himself out of that race, saying that he would prefer to run for reëlection to his pres- ent office. Regan, an attractive, easy- going Irish-American from upstate Erie County, had been routinely re- ferred to as the front-runner among the Republican guber- natorial candidates since he had entered that race, on Decem- ber 30th, and recent polls had shown that he would do better than any other Repub- lican against Mayor Edward Koch, who, from the time he an- nounced that he would be a candidate for Gov- ernor, on February 22nd, had been treated by most political com- mentators as if he had the Democratic nomi- nation locked up. Regan had said that he would "relish" the prospect of running against the Mayor, but he now gave as the ma10r reason for his wi hdrawal the drying CASTING PR.OBLEMS be serious, Dodd would probably have added, "Wait till next year." U NDER the circumstances, it is a matter for particular astonish- ment here-and, one would think, at the Republican National Committee- that in the second-most-populous American state, which Reagan carried in 1980, the President's party and its plans for this fall's elections should currently present a spectacle of footless disorder that one Democratic district leader happily described the other day as "pitiful." Sudden shifts in personae or plot can, of course, turn a political scene on end overnight. At the mo- ment, it seems that for N ew York Republicans almost any change could only be a big improvement. As of last week, the Republican state chairman, George Clark, had not come up with a senatorial candidate to run against Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic incumbent, who is up for reëlection this year, although it was over a month since Clark's origi- nal choice for the nomination, former New York Representative Bruce Caputo, had pulled out of the race. Caputo had had the backing of fifty- three of the state's sixty-two Republi- can county leaders, but this support had fallen to almost nothing late in February after it was revealed that he LEISURE T/M 85